Friday, November 23, 2012

I am excited to announce availability of the release build of GanttProject 2.6 "Brno". It adds numerous new features: zero duration milestones, outline numbers, timeline labels, to name a few (see the highlights below). We hope they will make your work with GanttProject more productive and pleasant.

Thanks a lot to those who spent their time on downloading beta and RC builds, using them in the daily work, fighting big and small bugs and reporting those bugs to us! Unfortunately it is not so easy to find and fix all bugs before the release, and it means that testing continues and we're waiting for the new bug reports. One severe issue has already been found, and there are a few more problems which we'd like to fix, so expect a bugfix release quite soon.

Thanks also to translators who did their best to update the most important translations: German, French, Spanish, Italian and a few others. We're still missing Japanese and Chinese translation updates, so please if you can and willing to do them, don't miss the chance :)

Special kudos to Aki Sivula from Finland who did an amazing job on updating Finnish translation and testing GanttProject!

GanttProject 2.6 highlights:

milestones have zero duration. That was a very old debt and we're glad that we have closed it;

new robust task scheduler;

tasks can be shown as labels in the timeline which are visible even if task is collapsed in the tree. By default, milestones are shown in the timeline, but any task can be put there;

tasks with notes are labeled now with a note icon on the chart and notes text appears in a tooltip when mouse is over icon;

Friday, November 16, 2012

We'd love to release GP 2.6 fully translated to the most popular languages, and at the moment, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese translations are those which need updates. If you're a native speaker of these languages and willing to contribute about 50 translations of the new strings in GanttProject interface, please do us and the whole community a favor! Translation guidelines are available on our Wiki pages: http://code.google.com/p/ganttproject/wiki/TranslationGuidelines

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

A new release candidate build of GanttProject 2.6 is available for downloading, and there are some important changes which you should be aware of.

TL;DR: there is new scheduling engine which may reschedule tasks in your existing projects. If it does, you'll see a warning when you open a project.

During GanttProject 2.0/2.5 lifetime we have received quite a few bug reports about our task scheduling engine. Sometimes parent tasks do not adjust their dates when their nested tasks change. Sometimes even more funny and weird things happen. I tried to fix such issues with small scope changes, but it finally turned out that "small" fixes were wrong way: they complicated scheduling code which was already quite difficult to understand and maintain. So I took a tough decision to replace scheduling engine with a new one, and this new engine was published in RC III.

With two or three bugs found by RC III users and fixed, it now works fine and looks more robust than old one. However, there is a side-effect: if your project is complex enough, there may be scheduling problems which old engine would ignore for a while. For instance, parent task dates could be wrong, and because of that a successor task with Finish-Start dependency could be scheduled earlier than it ought to be, and so on. New scheduler will detect and fix such problems, and as a result, some tasks may change their dates. The schedule overall will become more "healthy" but it may become an unwanted surprise for you. So, to let you know about such changes, GanttProject will show you a warning after opening a project file if it reschedules any tasks. You'll be able to find the details in the log.

Please notice that old scheduler could do the same changes, but at pretty random moments, so I hope this change is positive: it is better to know about all the problems at once and get a list of them, rather than discover them occasionally one by one.